Jonathan

On Oct. 14 at 12:30 p.m. on an unseasonably warm day in Arizona, I watched as my godson's casket was lowered into the grave and his family and friends each dropped a yellow rose into his grave.
It is inconceivable that Jonathan Zinsli is dead.
His mother had called me a week earlier at 5 p.m. on Oct. 7 sobbing, asking me if I could come to her home. What's wrong? Can you come to my home, she repeated. I had never heard such anguish in her voice. Yes.
The police had reached them to say that their 21-year-old son had been killed in a motorcycle accident earlier that day in Daytona Beach. Jon had moved there shortly after graduating from high school to attend Daytona State College. The school had a top-rated photography department and Jon was a talented photographer. His mother helped him move to Florida. He worked at Best Buy while he established residency and had enrolled in the school. He'd also bought a motorcycle. And on that morning, as we later learned from his legion of friends, co-workers, professors and exquisite girlfriends, he had ridden that motorcycle on his way to or from a photo shoot. A short distance. And an 80-year-old man in a red Toyota, driving the opposite direction, had made a left hand turn in front of him and Jon had hit the car, been thrown from his vehicle and died probably at the scene.
A young woman at the scene was with him and in the way information now gets shared these days posted on the Orlando Sentinel site that Jon's bravery in his last minutes of life had changed hers forever. She and Fran would wind up emailing back and forth in the first days that this crushing, unbelievable news seeped into the marrow of his mother's and father's bones, forever changing them.
On Oct. 14 in the Chapel of the Chimes mortuary those who love the Zinsli family and Jon, came to pay their respects. We filled the room. All there to weep and mourn with this remarkable family because the death of a vibrant, beautiful, smart, talented 21-year-old son full of life, of aching potential is an incomprehensible thing.
There was Rachel, Jon's first friend and co-worker, then fellow photography student, who Best Buy flew from Florida to attend the funeral. The family would learn that Best Buy had to bring in a grief counselor when word of Jon's tragic death spread. Photography professor Eric Breitenbach brought some of Jon's exquisite photoraphy and a message board students and professors had signed during a standing-room-only memorial service they held on Thursday morning after Jon's death. "He brought us all closer,'' Eric said.
Fellow students and Jon's roommate, Lukas, were there. His high school friends. His Boy Scout leader. His high school photography teacher who'd first scene Jon's talent and challenged him to step aside from his adolescent rage and self-absorption to first learn this craft before he explored its fringes.
His sweet sister. His two older brothers. His grandmother who held his newborn body in her arms when he was born at home with his grandmother, two brothers and the Glendale firefighters in attendance. His grandfther who took him on numerous deep sea dives and would have given him more camera equipment for underwater photography this Christmas. HIkers who, with Jon's family, had hiked most of the trails in Arizona and beyond.
The members of the B'Hai community and the Swiss community who watched him grow. The former sang piercingly aching songs at his funeral and at the gravesite. They read prayers.
And his family: his father, brothers Peter and Phillip, his sister, Katya, his uncle Michael and his mother each eulogized him. Unbelievably, eloquently, painfully standing before all of us talking about Jon. Their brother, son, nephew, grandson. And his professor, his girlfriends talked about his love, his talent (the most talented student I've seen in 29 years), his passions, his kindness, his loyalty, his wit, his mind, his hope.
And the story that lingers is the story his mother told of a fig tree the family had brought back to the desert with them from their two-year sojourn in Switzerland when Jon was a kindergartener.
She'd planted the tree and it had born sweet, full, delicious fruit. This remarkable family savors all things of the earth, most especially its fruit. They had enjoyed this fruit for many years and then the tree had begun to wither. It had seemingly tired so they cut the tree down. But Fran said that lately she had noticed a small, green shoot from the stub of its trunk. She'd begun watering the tree. Nurturing its tender green signs of life as I've watched her do with her children, her students, with all of us that gather round this remarkable woman.
And in that story, told at the funeral of her youngest son, Fran led each of us to the barely visible blades of hope.